Wednesday, May 15, 2013

Recycle!

My little one is growing so fast. This means, that we need new clothes each season. This time I wanted to be smart about it and took a look at all the clothes from last spring and summer to first check if something still fits and if I could recycle something.
The following project reminded me of this project here. What a great idea to recycle those shirts that are too short but still fit on top! The only difference in how I made this tunic is that I serged all the edges of the stripes from the old thirst. This is how I did it:

All of those tshirs and some other dresses do not fit anymore.

I picked 3 shirts that would look nice together and cut about 10 cm under the armpits from the main tshirt and some strips from the other ones.

Then I marked 1/4 on the top part and on the stips. Because I wanted the serged edges to show, I pinned left sides together on the marked quaters. I serged the two layers together and pinned the next strip, serged it and so on until I got the lenght I wanted. I used a contrasting thread and like the way it came out. Then I stamped some words and butterflies with permanent ink onto one of the strips. The birdie was already on one of the shirts that I pimped for Tina last year. The tutorial for the bird can be found here.

Take a look at the necklace that I made from some of the rests of the cut-up shirts:-)

I recycled some dresses which I made into skirts. For this I was cutting and throwing away the sleeve part of the dress or blouse as shown below and have sewn some cuffs on the waist. The cuffs are made either out of old tshirts or yardage.

here a few more that I recycled. In about 2 hours I was able to make 4 skirts and 2 dresses. Cool! those are things that we do not have to buy this year:-)